Soap making is a craft to many and for others it is a business. Ever wondered how much it costs to produce a natural bar of soap? Aside from manually calculating the cost yourself, or hiring a technology guru to create an application to calculate the cost per item, there is an easier way - Soapmaker3.

Soapmaker3 is a database program written for the lay person to track inventory, cost per item and even recipes. Soapmaker3 is the brainchild of Canadian couple Diane and Crawford Woodman, who create soaps themselves under the name Woodman soaps. The couple initially created a spreadsheet program to calculate recipes and over the years added more functionality to the application and revamped it to be database driven and more extensible, adding features to include a whole range of features that really makes this program a must have if you seriously want to make soaps to sell.

The program is a quick install and is available for PC. On the website it is listed as okay to use with the MAC and Linux. My source who has the software for her MAC said that she had problems installing it and using it on the MAC and eventually had to install it on a PC for it to work well. If you need the version for a MAC it is best to check the websites to see what options are listed for it to work on a MAC.

The program comes loaded with some of the most common ingredients used for making different kinds of soap products such as bar soap, liquid soap and even cream soaps. The most common ingredients are standard to which you can add whatever inventory you have on hand. To this inventory you can add new ingredients as you buy them and the program keeps track of stock as they are used. Other nifty features include, recipe calculation, recipe design, costs in local currency and even sales and invoice tracking.

The program calculates what you have on hand, the cost of these ingredients and all the factors that goes into producing the final product including labor cost and electricity to arrive at the final manufacturing cost per unit.